OUSE

Over the course of seven days in the spring of 2017, I travelled alone and on foot along the Sussex Ouse Valley Way, a 42 mile journey that broadly follows the River Ouse from its source in Lower Beeding near Horsham, out to the English Channel at Seaford Bay. As I went, I let my ears guide me, allowing them to be the sole indicator of where and when I should press record. At the journey’s end, I had gathered around twenty hours of audio material, many pages of notes relating to the site and conditions of each recording, and quite a number of photographs.

With this project I felt it was important to achieve a balance between the artistic and the scientific. As an artist, the inevitable individuality that one lends to his or her work is unavoidable, yet I still felt that with a work such as this, I wanted to remain as true as possible to the actual state of things, and to document the environment as it was at the time I was there. Consequently, it has been of great consideration during the composition of this work, as to how I might most accurately recreate the sensation of experiencing the acoustic environment as I encountered it first hand; to try and make the listener hear what I was hearing when I was there in person. As such, I deliberately leave the recordings as unprocessed as possible, only sometimes elaborating points of interest, not by altering their innate structure, but simply by augmenting or diminishing certain frequency bands, thereby highlighting specific sound sources. So whilst this piece is documentative in many respects, certain compositional and aesthetic choices perhaps render it more of an artistic impression of my own personal journey along the river, a sort of travelogue or aural diary of my excursion, as opposed to a scientific study per se.

B.D.Symonds

B. D. Symonds (UK)

British sound artist, composer, DJ and musician based in London, England. Working with both electronic and recorded sound, as well as traditional instrumentation, he has composed works for film, theatre, radio and record, and produced sound for mixed media installations that have been exhibited at renowned institutes such as The Design Museum (London), Art Basel (Miami), and Palazzo Delle Esposizioni (Rome). He holds an MMus in Sonic Arts from Goldsmiths College, London, where he specialized in phonography, soundscape composition, and acoustic ecology. He is also the founder of Studio 58, a boutique production house offering bespoke audio solutions for a wide range of media applications.

www.bdsymonds.com

www.bdsymonds.bandcamp.com

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews